> Doom, at the time, had great art. It hasn’t aged well.
It's in the eye of the beholder, but I strongly disagree with this. The art is absolutely timeless; cacodemons, cyberdemons, the super shotgun and the BFG9000 are some of the most recognizable video game designs of all time. Most importantly, the art direction feels very consistent and cohesive. You can contrast it to something like Heretic, which came out at the same time and runs on the same engine, yet looks noticeably worse.
I wouldn't play it at 320x200 on a modern PC, but take your pick of source port to run at 1080p+, and Doom still looks great.
We've come full circle on low-rez graphics, at the time it was the best definition they could generate but now it's an aesthetic.
The original Doom graphics work surprisingly well in VR, too. Fire up GZDoom with the VR mod (some fiddling required to make it work in Windows MR) and it works in a way I wouldn't have believed without seeing it.
A modern shooter that takes some inspiration from the doom (probably more Quake) era is "Boltgun". It's amazing and just so much fun. Play today. You can lower the graphics to look like Doom or adjust them to look like fairly decent, but obviously retro inspired. It's set in the Warhammer universe.
Regarding the datedness of games like Doom & Duke Nukem 3D, I've noticed a peculiar principle where they start off looking horribly dated to me, but my brain quickly adapts and I don't even notice the drop in realism after a few hours. It just becomes fun.
Boltgun's alright. My favorite of the neo-retro shooters is Amid Evil. (Weird to call a game with RTX raytracing support retro, but that's 2023 for you.)
But honestly, IMO, if you want to play Doom or Quake... I recommend just playing Doom or Quake. The modding scene for both games has been active for nearly 30 years, and there's still excellent content coming out for both games regularly. If anything, modding popularity has accelerated in recent years thanks to "Doomtubers" like decino giving additional exposure to custom maps. Dwell[0] came out this year and is one of the best Quake map sets/mods ever, and the Cacowards[1] always has great stuff, with the 2023 edition coming soon.
It's in the eye of the beholder, but I strongly disagree with this. The art is absolutely timeless; cacodemons, cyberdemons, the super shotgun and the BFG9000 are some of the most recognizable video game designs of all time. Most importantly, the art direction feels very consistent and cohesive. You can contrast it to something like Heretic, which came out at the same time and runs on the same engine, yet looks noticeably worse.
I wouldn't play it at 320x200 on a modern PC, but take your pick of source port to run at 1080p+, and Doom still looks great.